Free All the Lives He Led-A Novel by Frederik Pohl Page B

morning and was getting ready to go to my goddamn wheel. I could look down on that ruined old wreck of a city the way it really was when the virts weren’t beautifying it, jaggedly broken buildings that sulked in the moonlight, more shadow than substance. But then, before my jaded eyes, skeptical, cynical, exhausted from the long hours and the bullying Welsh Bastard, old Pompeii would be born again.
    To get ready for the day’s customers, every morning, they turned the city on.
    When they did that everything of the old city that age and disaster had destroyed was suddenly made whole. Buildings that had been no more than stumps for two thousand years suddenly got back their upper stories. Walls flashed into being where there had been nothing but rubble. From my window I could squint into some of the residential areas of the late Pompeiian well-to-do. I could see lush flower beds exploding into light-generated existence, reflecting pools that magically filled with sparkling clean water and captive birds beginning to sing. They even generated the people. There was this villa that said it was the home of a bigwig named Paoulous Proculus, and when that magicked itself into virt shape it was a big hit with the tourists. They couldn’t get into the atrium, because that was roped off, but the virts of P. Proculus and wife could be watched through a doorway as they endlessly nibbled on apples and peaches brought by relays of virt slaves.
    It was all holos, virts, and simulations. But it was splendidly done, right down to the bright curtains that flapped in some of the unglazed windows and the unreal, but convincing, pair of drayhorses that pawed the ground before my very bakery.
    From a distance it was absolutely convincing. Was from pretty close up, as well, unless you tried to touch it. Of course, there was nothing there, just some cleverly deployed photons.
    It was damn well spectacular, though. It almost made working there a pleasure, as long as you didn’t count in the smells, the lousy pay, the suffocating summer heat and, of course, the Welsh Bastard.
    I did like just to wander around on those streets that ancient Roman people had walked on two thousand years before. (All right, they weren’t exactly the same streets. In AD 79 they would have been ankle deep in all kinds of crap the old Romans and their animals regularly dropped into the street. The Giubileo couldn’t quite duplicate that feature of old Pompeiian life in 2079. The Board of Health didn’t allow it.) But so much of what was there looked really real, especially in that great open space they called the Forum. I mean the real one, the one with the Temple of Jupiter at one end, still under repair from what had happened to it in the AD 62 earthquake, and the sort of town hall place that they called the basilica at the other. Plus all those old statues and all the people. The tourists liked the Forum, too, so it was always crowded with people strolling around and chatting and pausing to buy some nice ripe figs or simulated ancient Roman jewelry from one of the Indentured peddlers who had staked out claims on the flagstones.
    You understand that when I say “people” I don’t mean only the flesh-and-blood ones. There were plenty of that kind of people—tourists and employees of the Giubileo, working at their assignments as fruit sellers and souvenir vendors and whatever else might make a euro’s profit for the Giubileo. But there were also the virts. There were always a dozen or more virtual Roman citizens—copies that the Giubileo swore to its customers were of actual, specific First Century Pompeiian notables. The one who was always carried in an open litter was named Umbricius Scaurus, and his claim to fame was that he was the guy who owned the factory where slaves manufactured that horrible stinky fish sauce they called garum. Sometimes sharing the litter with him—and thus no doubt making life a real living hell for the Nubians who had to carry them,